I found this on the kitchen counter today and am posting it in the “Food” category, but I’m pretty sure from the look of it that this isn’t a real product. It’s just a prop from “Dharma and Greg” or maybe Chris Onstead has a pilot television show with Pat as the central character.

Most of the posts for our new fence were set last week — the rest will be set early this week — so I started building with help from Kelly, Brian, Becky and Cynthia. I’m leveraging my dotMac website to keep a pict-o-build-a-gram. I used the edge of the house as a guide to set the cutting length of the poles. I really thought I would come away from the pipe cutting process looking like a crack addict, so next time I think I’ll use a Sandinista bandana on top of the goggles, hat and long-sleeve shirt. There was a lot of process improvement along the way. The first panel took a couple hours, but the last two panels were done in about 45 minutes. The rest of the panels will go up quickly now that we have a process worked out, though I may have to cut a couple limbs from the magnolia tree that hang down too low.

Got a couple of pounds to spare? Go pick up some artifacts from the UK’s heyday of Mechanical Engineering. From the Guardian:

A unique collection, including engine models made by George Stephenson, Richard Trevithick and other giants of British engineering history, will be scattered at auction over the next few days, as the museum which houses them finally runs out of steam.

The most spectacular pieces include George Stephenson’s own model, valued at up to £100,000, of his revolutionary Locomotion Number 1, the first engine built by the world’s first locomotive builder, which in 1825 took two hours to make the nine mile journey from Darlington to Stockton; his son Robert’s beautiful battered model, still with a chipped gilt Chilean coat of arms, sent in a successful bid to win orders from the Chilean government in the 1840s; Timothy Hackworth’s model of Sans Pareil, his locomotive built to compete with Stephenson’s Rocket; an 1802 model engine signed by Richard Trevithick; a scarlet Victorian horse-drawn steam powered fire engine, pretty as a child’s toy; and all 14.5 tonnes of a gold medal award-winning Corliss engine built by Crepelle and Garland in Lille in 1889, for which Mr Minns outbid a scrap dealer.

I’m of a mixed thought on this one. The current proprieter of the museum, Jonathan Minns, makes a good point: “In every other profession, in art, in law, in medicine, in architecture, students are taught the history of the discipline, they understand that the past informs the present, but not in engineering, where the past is seen as irrelevant stuff, an embarrassment. And yet the world has never had more need of engineers.”

As much as I love old stuff (If any of y’all are ever up here in the fall, we’ll head just down the road to a historic steam-fired apple press, and get some fresh cider, then down to the basement of the mill for some hard stuff), Minns is somewhat missing the boat regarding engineering (and medicine). In art, in law, etc, there is a need to put things in context. Does our current concept of Intellectual Property, for instance, stand on its own absent the history of copyright?

Engineering, on the other hand, either works, or it does not work. Given a solid foundation in hard science and a knowledge of the current state of the art, engineers can continue to innovate without worrying about re-inventing the wheel.

If anything, a lack of history is a plus in engineering, where advances in technology can make approaches that once were technologically infeasable attractive. While communism, slavery, and other economic and political approaches (NB – GK’s “Writer’s Almanac” had a fluff bit on Marx a couple of days ago) rightly deserve to be consigned to the ashbin of history, and a knowledge of the past can help prevent future hardship and heartace, the same does not apply to previously failed or sub-par engineering approaches, such as ethanol, electric cars, and nuclear power.

Bully to Mr. Minns for trying to preserve history, though.